Trying to get your crush to notice you? You may want to change your cellphone number.

Frequent texting has so rewired our brains, says a recent German study, that when dialling numbers we unconsciously think of the words behind them. We even adopt the emotional feeling of the words, such that we prefer dialling numbers that correspond to “positive” words, such as LOVE (5683) or FRIEND (374363), rather than FEAR (3327) or SLIME (75463).

The more we text, the stronger the link. But we remain oblivious.

“This is an illustration of how technology shapes our mind,” said Sascha Topolinski, psychology professor at the University of Würzburg, and author of the study published this week in Psychological Science, the journal of the Washington-based Association for Psychological Science.

Topolinski’s experiments are rooted in the study of embodiment, an area of psychology that describes the process by which our brain gathers information from our body.

Repeated texting has created a link between our motor functions and our brain, so that whether we intend to use a phone’s buttons for letters or numbers, both meanings are simultaneously retrieved.

The study consisted of three experiments, and participants were undergraduate university students who believed they were participating in ergonomics research. Letters were removed from the keypad buttons, and debriefing interviews found that none of the participants suspected the study’s true purposes.

In the first experiment, participants in two groups — one dialling numbers on cellphones, the other on a computer keyboard — dialled a number and then had to identify whether a word on a computer screen was real or nonsense.

Participants who dialled a number which corresponded to the word on the screen were able to more quickly identify the word than those who dialled noncorresponding numbers.

The control group on the computer keyboards did not show similar results.

“This indicated the very meaning of those words was unconsciously activated” in the cellphone users, Topolinski says.

Moreover, participants with more texting experience had quicker reaction times.

The second experiment looked at the feelings participants derived from dialling certain numbers by asking them to rate the number on how pleasant it was to dial.

Researchers found participants preferred dialling numbers that corresponded to so-called positive words, as opposed to negative or neutral words. Although participants were oblivious to the words behind the numbers, Topolinski says, they still “felt the emotional significance.”

The final experiment found that participants preferred one company over another if the phone number corresponded to a word relevant to their business — such as WEALTH for a financial consultant or CORPSE for a mortician — regardless of the emotional value or positivity of the word.

This goes beyond the explicit strategic mnemonics businesses already use — 1-800-RENT-CAR, for instance, or 967-11-11 — by subliminally shaping the attitude and opinion of the caller. For example, a donation hotline may want to choose a number sequence with the hidden words GIVE or CARE, Topolinski said.

This is what most intrigues Lawrence Shapiro, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of the recently published Embodied Cognition, which aims to explain the relatively new field in cognitive science.

“The idea that you could conceivably manipulate people by choosing phone numbers of a certain kind is kind of scary and thrilling at the same time.”

The other parts of the study are less revelatory, Shapiro said.

“We’ve known for a long time that technology influences psychology,” and these types of associations between our bodies and brains have been made before, he said.

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